BORIS DAY as CALAMITY GAIN

Boris Johnson is the most preposterous figure in professional politics since Sir Gerald Nabarro. Yet the citizens of London have elected him mayor by a comfortable margin in preference to Ken Livingstone, one of the wiliest and most accomplished politicians this side of Bill Clinton. Have Londoners taken leave of their senses? Do they hate Gordon Brown’s government so profoundly that they are prepared to sacrifice a consummate operator for an indisciplined twit?

Nothing in politics is ever simple, except when it is. There can be little doubt that Livingstone, along with hundreds of humble local councillors across the land, has paid the price for the government’s ham-fistedness over the last six months. BBC commentators keep issuing what they call “a health warning” against extrapolating calculations about the state of play at Westminster from the local election figures but there can be little doubt that, with some notable exceptions (Wales, Liverpool), voters are more concerned to “send a message” to Downing Street than to reward or punish local councillors of whose work they are at best very dimly aware.

Time and again, the national coverage (again, the BBC especially) has been apologetic – perhaps with no great sincerity – for giving time to the race for mayor. No need for apology in my book. Ken Livingstone was certainly the only mayoral figure in Britain to whom I could put a name and I surely am not unique. Livingstone always had a national profile, as Johnson does. So does Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate who came in a very distant third. I doubt that any of the parties – certainly not the Tories and Labour – will ever run a London candidate who does not already have name recognition. It’s a chicken and egg thing, but I suspect that the London mayoral race will always be followed nationally and that the candidates will reflect that following.

Livingstone certainly made a contribution to his own demise. His cavalier way with public funds is hardly unique among public servants or peculiar to one or other party. His embrace of Islam would have been sufficient by itself to prevent me from voting for him (though I would never have voted for Johnson). But he has also been subjected to a sustained and vitriolic attack by Associated Newspapers (the Mail group), concentrated in the Evening Standard, the capital’s only surviving citywide paper that is not a free sheet. Moreover, there was a disgraceful television hatchet job by a man who, strangely enough, is evidently the political editor of the New Statesman. The poisons from such biased and unproven coverage were bound to have some effect. Belatedly, The Guardian tried to drum up a head of steam against Johnson but I suspect it was largely preaching to the converted.

Previously sound voters appear to have turned out for Johnson. One old friend expressed “hatred” for Livingstone, founded, she admitted, on his accusation that a Standard journalist was behaving like a concentration camp guard. I frankly don’t understand the argument that, because the journalist declared to Livingstone that he was Jewish, the then mayor should have withdrawn the remark. He wasn’t being gratuitously anti-semitic, he was making a point about people who justify their behaviour by claiming that they’re only doing their job.

The reporter door-stepped Livingstone as he returned from a party. No doubt Livingstone was not wholly sober. He spoke unguardedly to a pushy reporter from a paper he had every reason to despise and mistrust. Who can blame him? As one was who a member of the National Union of Journalists for thirty years, I say without a qualm that journalists are, by and large, the scum of the earth. Livingstone made a slighting remark about a reporter. His Jewishness was neither here nor there. Indeed, Livingstone could have argued, reasonably enough, that, being Jewish, the reporter ought to have been all the more reluctant than any gentile to use the doing-my-job justification. I am sure that Livingstone is anti-Zionist but then so is every Jew that I know.

Boris Johnson, on the other hand, is avowedly and gratuitously racist, sexist, homophobic and a snob. What kind of a signal does that send to the world? Yet people who blithely deplored Italians voting Silvio Berlusconi back into office last week went out and voted for Johnson this week. Another reason my friend gave for voting against Livingstone was that she remembered covering the Poulson/T Dan Smith scandal in Newcastle some 35 years ago and reckoned that being too long in office is corrupting. I’m not wholly persuaded by this. It seems a slightly less daffy version of the reason my Auntie Freda gave for voting Tory back in 1970: “I think it’s their turn”. I remembering thinking at the time: “it’s got nothing to do with being their turn and everything to do with you being a Tory”. Five’ll get you ten she couldn’t bring herself to vote Labour in 1964, even out of that professed sense of fair play.

If you’re going to argue that parties in power lose touch with their roots and their reality, you’re arguing for changing your own politics on a regular basis, merely so that you can vote the other lot in after a suitable interval. That makes no sense to me. I think Blair was the worst prime minister of my lifetime and that Brown has been a crushing disappointment. After an adulthood of voting Labour, usually for somebody who didn’t get returned to parliament, I voted Liberal Democrat in 2001 and 2005, not because I thought it was Charlie Kennedy's "turn" but because I thought Blair was a warmonger. I can’t imagine that I will feel moved to vote Labour in 2009 or 2010, though of course a lot may change in the meantime. But I sure as hell won’t vote Tory. As things stand, there is no party I feel I can comfortably vote for.

Among the things that will have changed by 2009 or 2010 will be that London will have had a year or two of Boris Johnson as mayor. It’s an understandable expectation that he will screw up big time and that he will hence prove to be an embarrassment to David Cameron, presently basking in the success of gambling his own reputation on Johnson’s success. But as I said before, nothing in politics is ever simple. Nor is it predictable. Johnson will know that it will all fall apart in his hands if he doesn’t prove to be an expert manager and an instinctive delegator. He will give himself his best chance by surrounding himself with able people and no doubt the Tory Party will not only help him with that but want a big say in his choices. In that sense, the likeliest outcome of Johnson’s mayoralty may just be that he falls out in a big way with the party machine.